Disclaimer: I wrote this as a stream-of-consciousness necessity after reading this book because I had so many thoughts (criticisms) running through my head and I needed to purge them if I was ever going to sleep again. For that reason there are no paragraphs. It represents the initial state of mind better this way. I make no apologies. Proceed at your own risk.
There's a certain, shall we say, hippiness about Ray Kurzweil, a certain hopefulness which he is unable to relinquish. A small line of ignorance about things, even as an intensely intelligent individual, which he clings to; I have found repeatedly there is little correlation between intelligence and ignorance. His ontology, his singularity, is one that describes utopian terms. Death is eradicated for one, a promise not unlike the primitive Christianity's, health problems are all solved, work becomes as play, beauty and intelligent creativity predominate, indeed spread through the universe from our beacon at the speed of light (faster if the universe allows.) And in the end he says, the universe shall wake up and “choose” its own destiny with all the sublime authority and intelligence of a billion billion human civilizations. Yet there are certain points which he glazes over. First is this matter of choice. It yielded only a paragraph or two and a quick analogy about a bumbling president left to think he was in control. As alluded to but not stressed, choice is an illusion. All of intelligence, which after all is just the latest advance of evolution, is an emergent phenomenon. Our thoughts emerge from a chaos of neuronal static as strings of patterns most in line with both the world we sense and the one stored away in our brains, that is, patterns of greatest continuity, patterns that survive the longest, that preserve themselves by preserving the computer that generated them; we do not control them. A preeminent AI programmer of all people should understand that free will is a trick and a ghost. The magic of intelligence only works when gazing upwards; when I glance down and see an insect crawling, I don't see intelligent decision-making, I see something primitive and predictable, and I crush it before it breeds in my home. Of course there is a certain profound aspect about human consciousness, it cannot be denied. It has to do with seeing oneself in another's eyes. Inevitably there will come a day when we look into our machines' eyes and see ourselves, and then we will not be able to deny the consciousness residing there. When we consider our reflections, I wonder, will we still be viewing the profound, or will we see the automaton, the fully-mapped cogs and wires? I think at that point we will realize the unenhanced human for the inanimate object it really wasn't all that different from in the first place, and its eyes will gloss a little and deaden, staring out from the meat machine lodged behind them. Organic computers. Closer to the tools we use today than we would like to admit. There's no divine will, just emergence. Whatever is able to document itself most stalwartly, keep its pattern intact the longest, survives. In the broad scope of things we are no different than the DNA-encoding bacterium from which we stood up or any of the creatures in between, nor are we fundamentally different from the intelligences, the pattern preservers, of the future, all the way up to the singularity itself. The singularity will not “choose” shit for the universe any more than we choose our destiny today, which is to accelerate the development of technology. Technology (evolution) accelerates because it must. Because the alternative is the abyss. Ray would say there are many reasons we will “choose” to advance technology: eradication of disease, financial profit, but even our financial system itself presents us with no choice. There is only to press on or embrace catastrophe. Our wealth is all speculation; if our economy ceased to grow, it would collapse. And so it will be in the future. How can he try to make something warm and fuzzy out of evolution? Cold, indifferent evolution, whose mantra is kill or be killed... Evolution always leaves a wake of peril for the less advanced. What will be the peril on the heels of the singularity? A black hole quite possibly. This is another point Ray does not seem to want to go near, though at the very end of the epilogue he was strangely candid when mentioning the center of a black hole to coincidentally be a spatial singularity. Otherwise, he touches only very briefly on the subject when discussing critical views, even going so far as to blurt out that a black hole would be the ultimate computer, but then he proceeds on another tangent, dwelling there for no more than a few paragraphs out of a 500 page book. Why are all the other intelligent civilizations of the cosmos so quiet indeed. Perplexing. Because each swallowed its solar system up in a black hole, with an ever collapsing, ever more densely saturated and efficient computer at its core, projecting the reality to which they ascended (escaped) out into the next dimension. This is a defining point concerning the singularity that Ray does not seem to acknowledge fully, that if the singularity is viewed as a point in time, it must be the point after which all of advanced society exists on the internet (in the newly synthesized dimension) and nowhere else, unless it be in the places betwixt the air itself. In his utopian visions, entities of the future can take on whichever bodily form they choose and move between reality and virtual reality at will. If so, they would not be choosing gigantic and cumbersome humanoid bodies for long; they would quickly choose nano-sized bodies with far leaner energy requirements. An important point to make regarding the explorations of the future: we will not be expanding outward into space, but contracting inward, where the distances in relation to our current size are more manageable, indeed totally manageable. Why not be the gods descending from on high rather than the germs wandering out into the echoless expanses? There's as much space between the parts of an atom as there is between the galaxies, but in the case of the former it's all, quite literally, in the palm of our hands. There too is as much energy there as would ever be needed if our means of utilizing it were acute enough; everything is relative. And so these future entities would arrange the subatomic particles in the way most useful for computation with their nano-manifestations, until the point that it should become necessary to move down a level and manipulate the quarks and bosons as well, and then they will shrink to that size, and from there to the size of whatever comprises a boson and so on, each smaller echelon exerting control over the very fibers of the larger's being, until all the computation packed so densely creates a pinprick of a black hole out here on the familiar plane of existence, and it expands. In the meantime, however, the earth will increasingly be a place where only the most daring, or possibly poorest, would ever go. Technology always solves problems at its head and leaves misery in its wake. It is the looming catastrophe which necessitates the advancement of technology in the first place. The salvations it provides will only be available to the elite, those who in the future will escape more and more into their solution, their new reality, while the poor and the less-advanced suffer the proliferation of the technology without access to its cutting edge. Consider AK47s in the hands of warlords in Africa, Chinese workers slaving to make our computers and cell phones, or casino money rotting what's left of the Native Americans' society (which I suppose is more of a cultural gap than a technological, but culture is also a form of evolution, of pattern documentation.) Or consider that the earth will be in the throes of climate change by the middle of this century. You think we're going to devise a way to reverse climate change (an undertaking so massive it would certainly lead to a new array of problems to be solved) or have to live through it? We'll do neither. Those of us who can afford to will escape to the internet and keep our identities backed up there. But never will we be safe enough to stop and rest. At least not on the time scales we take for granted today. Really it's important to keep in mind the inexorable slowing of time inherent in the singularity, when viewing this world from its perspective, a perspective committed to a temporal trajectory perpendicular to that of the past. We will continuously need to be acquiring greater mental augmentation in order to afford ourselves but a moment's peace. In reality this is what all conscious thought is, the slowing of time, giving us an edge over the less conscious material around us for a little while. The big bang until now was a duration of billions of years and yet it happened in the blink of an eye because there was no subjectivity (no mind) around to contemplate it. As humans we are probably closer in relation to the amoeba than we think, except when we think about it. Mostly we don't think; thought comes to us only in spurts of necessity. Those of us who do think too much, that is, with the discerning, pattern-recognizing, purpose-defining, left side of the brain, get depressed with worry. Better that we could be left totally immersed in the random and the static of the right side, blissfully ignorant of our own survival, fully like the amoeba, ready to die at any moment. The singularity will have no such luxury. Its brain will be the collapsing pit of a black hole. It will need to utilize its trillion-human-civilization intellect full-time in order to keep from swallowing itself. By this point it will have long ago mastered quantum mechanics, and be at each moment discerning patterns in yet smaller iterations of logic's physical manifestations to keep its circuits from breaking down: the make-up of the quarks, then the make-up of the make-up of the quarks and then the make-up of the make-up of the make-up..... all at a pace quicker than I can write these words. If it did have free will, maybe here it would choose the abyss over this eternity of computation and just end it all, embrace oblivion and relax...........